CW: The usual grief and death, disordered eating, body shame stuff

“Wow, I never met him, but I really respect the guy,” he said, on a stretch of highway between Chicago and Ann Arbor, hand on the wheel, eyes resolute, delivered with a dry Alaskan certainty. I was in my early 20s, a few weeks before departing for my second Burning Man, and I had just told the story of how my dad had died after his second heart attack, just a few weeks after he and my mom had taken me for the best vacation of my childhood, Thomas Edison Museum, Busch Gardens, and Disney World. The vacation where I faked drowning to see if I could get my dad into the pool with me. The vacation where my mom rode with me on Space Mountain, scared out of her mind, because he couldn’t do it.

“What? Why?”

“He loved you so much, that he took his family on that vacation, knowing he might not have had that much time left.”

I had never considered that about my dad, or his character, until he said that to me just then, 15 years after my dad’s passing.

It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m sitting at table looking out the window at the church in the center of town, staying at a cramped aparthotel in Reykjavík. I just got in from two nights at the local hospital. Pancreatitis. It was unexpected, and after tests including a CT scan, is unknown in origin.

My theory as to the cause is interaction between my regular meds, and a lovely bit of high-end dinner with friends. Neither here nor there, my goal is to make it through the next few days, enjoying Iceland, and having a safe and comfortable landing back home on Sunday.

It’s Friday night, and I feel like this week I’ve been crossing into another grief stage. An awareness of myself, a vulnerability that clashes with an intense desire to be invulnerable and beholden to no one. Like Jon, who most frustratingly at times, above all things, wanted to do things on his own terms.

I don’t remember my dreams much these days, but this trip started with revisiting Jon and his cancer. The one I remember the most was when he was behind a door, and I couldn’t see him, and he didn’t want to be seen. He’s been in a few others as well, but I don’t remember the colors or shapes. The past couple weeks have just been a feeling of profound unfairness. Awareness of not only what I had, and what we needed to work on, but what we lost. The opportunities to grow, to heal old wounds that triggered each other so deeply.

I realized last week I had been really unfair to a new friend.

When you project your own insecurities onto someone else, about yourself, you can end up coming off rather… harsh. Luckily, I came off as sarcastic, but it’s an important bit of reflection.

It made me realize I’ve got some tending to do not just to my long lasting friendships, but also newer ones as I try to build my place in community.

And as much as I’ve been riding a high of individualistic gusto, at the very heart of it — my heart — doing all this without a partner feels impossible. Jon was the only person I felt I could count on to such a profound degree. We found each other, clung to each other, chose each other and nights in over social nights out. It was not perfect, but he was my best friend. And he would know how scared I was this week. And he’d make me feel like I could hope it would all be alright.

When you’re fat, you are not an innocent victim of malady. Just like I would have to specify to prying folks that Jon’s lung cancer was the “non-smoking” kind, which would make them tut and say, “how sad,” instead of stare blankly as if he deserved it, my dad was always partially blamed for dying at 38 from his second heart attack. He was fat, high blood pressure, smoker. Really, he did it to himself. Right? Being told while growing up, my mom having my cholesterol checked regularly, weight loss groups, diet pills (for ADHD!), water pills. Didn’t want to end up like my dad. And this all started before I was even 10, before I was even really “fat.”

The other story is this. My dad started smoking at a young age as a boy growing up in Southern Kentucky, where his family grew tobacco, and he worked on harvesting and drying. He could have been addicted to nicotine from dermal exposure before he even smoked a single cigarette. When he was in high school, he got sick and was hospitalized with rheumatic fever, which damaged his heart. I didn’t find this out until years later, when his oldest sister said it over the dinner table.

All those years — all the blame I had taken on my dad’s behalf…

But Jon shouldn’t be blamed for his cancer.

I’m shaken. I spent most of today trying to make up for the two days I lost with my kids when I was in the hospital. We went on a bus tour of the Golden Circle, and a Reykjavík thermal pool. I got my kids to do a few rounds of cold plunge, and then back to the hot soak. As nice as Sky Lagoon was, the public thermal pool is where it’s at, especially at a $12 admission.

How could I have prevented what happened? How can I prevent it from happening again? Who blames me? Do I deserve to be blamed?

We watched my favorite episode of The Good Place, ‘Jeremy Bearamy’ last night. I watch it for Chidi’s breakdown, because what do you do when you know how it’s going to end?

You try.

That’s why we came to Iceland, and that’s why I’ve gotten through the past nearly 6 months. I’ve been trying. Old parts of myself, new parts of myself, new adventures, new ideas, saying “Why not?”

We head home tomorrow. I said I’d come to Iceland and be open to what it teaches me…

The abyss stares back.